The Guardian view on Liz Truss and Brexit: new chapter, same story
Since her appointment as foreign secretary in September, Liz Truss has said little about the European Union. Her speeches exalt the UK as the broker of a global “network of liberty”, listing alliances with scarcely any reference to the club of democracies on Britain’s continental doorstep. That omission partly reflects the ideological temper of the Conservative party, to which Ms Truss is highly sensitised. It also expressed divisions of labour in the cabinet when David Frost was in charge of post-Brexit negotiations with Brussels. But since Lord Frost’s resignation, the European portfolio has returned to the Foreign Office. Silence on the subject is no longer an option for the secretary of state.
Her first intervention has been to restate Britain’s readiness to trigger article 16 of the withdrawal agreement, suspending its operation, if grievances regarding the Northern Ireland protocol are not satisfied. The terms demanded by Lord Frost for a renegotiation still stand.
The pugnacious tone disappointed those who had hoped that a change in personnel indicated a new willingness to compromise. That prospect is not entirely lost. Ms Truss had to signal continuity in the negotiating position. Anything else would have caused a commotion on the Tory benches and destabilised an already wobbly government. That does not rule out a pragmatic shift in the coming months. The foreign secretary will not want Brexit to consume all of her political bandwidth, and the most efficient way to avoid that is to take her finger off the article 16 trigger.
There are two obstacles. One is Ms Truss’s ambition, scarcely veiled, to succeed Boris Johnson in Downing Street. That will involve pandering to Europhobic sentiment among Tory grassroots and backbench MPs, at the expense of sound diplomacy. The second is the disparate way that Brexit scatters its consequences across Whitehall, beyond the institutional reach of the Foreign Office. At the strategic level, that is the correct base for the development of European relations, but Mr Johnson’s Brexit was drafted in defiance of strategic thinking. He has explicitly ruled Britain out of institutionalised foreign policy cooperation with Brussels.
Disentangling Britain from EU membership has huge ongoing consequences for border management, economic policy, trade, relations between Westminster government and the devolved administrations. There are problems yet to be resolved around the replacement of lost EU subsidies for agriculture and poorer regions. Fisheries will be a constant headache. Lord Frost’s portfolio also included questions of regulatory reform, exploring supposed benefits of Brexit by scrubbing the residue of Brussels form the statute book. Taken in the round, few cabinet ministers are unaffected, and it is unclear whether Ms Truss has the capacity or the will to coordinate the process. Much of the dayto-day engagement with Brussels will fall to her ministerial deputy, Chris Heaton-Harris, a hardliner who formerly chaired the perennially dissatisfied European Research Group of MPs.
Even with an application of pragmatic will, the structural impediments to a more sensible European policy are great. The underlying reason is the longstanding failure in government to understand or even engage with the full implications of leaving the EU on the terms that Mr Johnson negotiated. Until that is fixed, the relationship will be unbalanced and uneasy. And fixing it is more a question of regime change than cabinet reshuffle.